The Grenfell tragedy exposed Britain’s utter failure to learn from others. This is what turning inwards looks like

The nub of the problem is an insular self-regard that sees the UK as special. Born largely of ignorance about elsewhere, that consensus prevails until something calls it into question

It may seem perverse, on the day after the UK should have left the European Union (according to the last timetable but one), to consider what this country might learn from others. Was not the Brexit vote a statement about going it alone rather than submitting to common regulations and working as a group?

But leaving the EU – if and when it happens – does not have to mean that we go it alone even more than we currently do, nor should it – whatever is being mooted about a regulatory “race to the bottom”.

The current bureaucratic fashion for “evidence-based solutions” and “best practice” suggests another way, but is no more than jargon for approaches that should surely have been applied since time began. If they weren’t, why weren’t they?

One explanation, I would suggest, could be the UK’s generally poor record on learning from others, including our fellow Europeans. England has recently deigned to follow devolved parts of the UK in some small respects. Scotland set the pace on anti-smoking legislation, for instance, and Wales in charging for plastic bags. England is now adopting Scotland’s “public health” approach to knife crime. But how often do we hear about the UK adopting practices that have proved successful further afield?

This week has provided some graphic examples of where and how the UK could and should have learned from others, but for the most part has not.

The first, and most graphic, came with the publication of the Phase 1 report of the Grenfell Inquiry. The chair, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, levelled some of his fiercest criticism at the London Fire Brigade. Not at the officers on the ground, who, he stressed, acted heroically in conditions for which they had mostly not been trained or equipped, but at poor equipment, communications capacity and procedures. Streamlined structures simply did not exist on the night; the different emergency services were under separate commands.

Leave aside for the moment, what the installation of this particular cladding might say about UK building regulation. (This will be addressed in the Phase 2 report, and may well offer further evidence on the value of learning from others.) But there was a host of elementary shortcomings at Grenfell, and some of the very same things that had gone wrong at the Lakanal House fire in south London eight years before also went wrong at Grenfell, leading Sir Martin to say almost despairingly that the London Fire Brigade “is an institution at risk of not learning the lessons” of Grenfell.

Yet there are international examples that London, and the UK generally, could learn from. On communications and the coordination of the emergency services, there might be something to learn from France, which completely revamped its procedures after the metro bombing of 1995, establishing emergency rosters and chains of command that are invoked instantly in the event of this sort of emergency. Despite the existence of this experience just across the English Channel, the response not just to the 7/7 London bombings in 2005, but also to the London Bridge terrorist attack 12 years later seemed to be characterised by the same combination of ill-coordinated emergency services supplemented by the ad hoc contribution of selfless volunteers. Utterly laudable, but not worthy of an advanced industrialised country.

Then take planning for fire emergencies. London has decided in recent years (questionably, to my mind) to build upwards. But if this is policy – and there are currently more than 500 new blocks of more than 20 storeys in the pipeline – then the emergency services must be adapted to cope, with the costs being factored in to the development. How much has the UK looked at how the fire services in, say, New York City or Hong Kong, are equipped to tackle blazes in high-rises? The London Fire Brigade could not deal with Grenfell (albeit partly because this fire did not behave in the ways it had expected); it is only now preparing for the delivery of a higher crane. How would it deal with blocks double the height?

Fires and other emergencies, though, are by no means the only area where the UK, and specifically England, might have something to learn from elsewhere. A 75th-annniversary event organised this week by the economics think tank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, highlighted some truly alarming statistics

One was that, of the 20 per cent of pupils who fail to reach expected standards by the age of 11, only a tiny proportion ever catch up. In other words, failure at age 11 (and we are not talking about the 11-plus grammar entry examination) dooms a pupil educated in England to a lifetime of educational failure. Another was that in England, uniquely among developed countries, the average standard of literacy has actually declined from one generation to the next. The score of the youngest group (16-18) is lower than that of the oldest group measured (55-65).

Almost as shocking as those statistics, however, was the reluctance of the expert panel to answer this question: are there other countries that do this better? Cue much waffling about special circumstances and national characteristics. Rather than flirting with fashionable ideas, such as maths classes a la China or Singapore, should we not be looking at how other countries, especially in northern Europe, managed to do better than we do in the absolute basics?

My third example comes from another set of statistics that came to light this week about “our” revered NHS. Lawyers, it turns out, (as sensationally reported by the Daily Mail), were paid “£13 every second last year by the health service”, while damages paid out by the NHS reached £1.3bn. These two huge outgoings – one reflecting the expensive tendency of the NHS to contest claims in the courts, the other the actual incidence of medical errors, especially in maternity care – at very least demand serious reflection, as does the generally poorer performance of the NHS, compared with many other European countries, in treating some cancers and other diseases.

Why does the UK lag behind? What is it not doing that others do? Is – as was controversially suggested earlier this year – our GP gatekeeper system delaying diagnosis and treatment in some cases, compared with countries which facilitate direct access to specialists? Why do we have proportionally far fewer MRI scanners than most other European countries? Why are we still not training anything like enough doctors and nurses, instead recruiting them expensively from countries that can?

As for the contaminated blood scandal – now meandering its way through a public inquiry more than 20 years on – France got its own similar scandal through the courts in the 1990s. Heads rolled and political careers were blighted. How come it has taken the UK until now?

I could go on. Why can we not get our act together on social care for elderly people, when France, Germany and Japan – even Scotland – seem to have cracked it? Why are our border and labour controls so lax that Chinese and Vietnamese go-betweens can make fortunes delivering their human cargo to work illegally in the UK (until something goes tragically wrong)?

The nub of the problem, it seems to me, is an insular self-regard that sees the UK as special. There seems to be a consensus that our standards and services are state-of-the-art, that “our NHS” can do no wrong, and that, well, yes, our schools may have their difficulties, but with record numbers now graduating from university, we are ahead of the pack. Born largely of ignorance about elsewhere, that consensus prevails until something – such as the Grenfell Tower fire, or a personal brush with medical error or appalling hospital conditions – calls it, all too briefly, into question.

The Grenfell inquiry offers a grim opportunity for London, England and the UK to look at themselves in the mirror, grasp how they really measure up internationally, and accept, with due humility, that there is something to learn from elsewhere. Our complacency has gone on too long.